Email Marketing

Most people think of email as being sent from outlook or gmail. Basic text, photos and attachments crafted on a WSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. The reality, however, is that digital marketers have tools that surpass the basic emails sent out by average consumers.

The underpinnings of emails are HTML, just like other internet pages. The upside of this is that emails can be tracked, tested and targeted towards customers using snippets of code. The downside is unfortunately that people who do not know how to manage basic HTML code have a difficult time understanding how to send out “professional” emails that are well-formatted and that can be tracked.

There are tools out there that aim to make the process a bit easier. In my experience, I’ve used HTML email providers such as Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor. While there are components of these services that make building out email templates a bit easier, it still requires an element of HTML knowledge to send out effective HTML emails. The end product of an email sent out with Campaign Monitor, for example, allows the sender to measure the number of people who opened the email, clicked on links, and export such data to Excel. A marketer can gauge interest in an email through opens and clicks and then follow up with potential customers. (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/report/)

Whereas in the past, Adobe integrated such tools through third parties – in 2013, the company acquired a company called Neolane for $600M (~10x revenue) which provides such services, in addition to many more (including integration with direct mail, MMS, SMS, and social media – and outright marketing automation). This acquisition came on the heels of Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget for $2.5bn (8.3x revenue). Email is only a component of the offerings available within the Neolane and ExactTarget platforms, but the importance of direct consumer/business targeting can be easily illustrated through email as an example.